Big Data (BD) technology has grown in popularity over the last few years across a wide range of industries, from business and government to scientific and research (Ajana, 2015). Accounting and auditing are no exception, as businesses are confronted with an unprecedented amount of semi-structured and unstructured massive data, which they must use and manage in order to be innovative, effective, and competitive. On the one hand, we can see a surge of interest in BD as a result of the recognition of opportunities in a variety of fields (Marshall et al., 2015; Verma and Bhattacharyya, 2017; Vera-Baquero et al., 2015; Enget et al., 2017). According to Wang and Cuthbertson (2015), BD and Big Data Analytics (BDA) play a potentially important role in innovative auditing practise. Several studies have discussed and examined broad areas of BD and BDA in external auditing by explaining and providing context for researchers, drawing their attention to it in terms of general issues, and arguing that the use of BDA is appropriate and valuable to ensure audit quality.

REQUIRED:

Express the organisational intentions to use Big Data and Big Data Analytics (BDA) in external auditing.